Cronon - 'a Place for Stories'

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A Place for StoriesNature History and Narrative

William Cronon

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man l e t me offer you a definition- is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake notan empty space but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. Hehas to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there sa story it s all right. Even in his last moments, it s said, in the split second of a

fatalfal l

or when he s about to drown- he sees passing rapidly before him, thestory of his whole life- Graham Swift Water and

In the beginning was the story. Or rather: many stories, of many places, in manyvoices, pointing toward many ends.

In 1979, two books were published about the long drought that struck the GreatPlains during the 1930s. The two ha d nearly identical titles: one, by Paul Bonnifie1d,was called The Dust Bow/, th e other, by onald Worster, Dust Bow ,l Th e twoauthors dealt with virtually th e same subject, ha d researched many of the samedocuments, an d agreed on most of their facts, an d yet their conclusions could hardlyhave been more different.

Bonnifield s closing argument runs like this:

William Cronon is professor of history at Yale University.I would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have read and criticized various versions of this

essay David Laurence was responsible for convincing me, rather against my will, that the perspective I ve adoptedhere could be neitherignored nor evaded, and he offeredgenerous guidance as I tried to acquire th e critical vocabulary that would allow me to tackle these problems. As always David Scobey has been my most faithful guide inhelping me find my way through th e dense thickets of literary theory. Comments an d suggestions from ThomasBender, Elise Broach, Robert Burt, Michael P Cohen,James Davidson, David Brion Davis, Kai Erikson, Ann Fa-bian, Peter Gay Amy Green, Michael Goldberg, Ramachandra Guha, Reeve Huston, Susan Johnson, HowardLamar, Jonathan Lear, Patricia Limerick, Arch McCallum, George Miles, Katherine Morrissey Ji m O Brien, RobertShulman, Thompson Smith, Alan Taylor, Paul Taylor, SylviaTesh, Thompson Webb III, Timothy Weiskel, RichardWhite, Bryan Wolf, Donald Worster, and two anonymous readers likewise helped shape my thoughts on this subject. Finally, lowe a special debt to David Thelen and Steven Stowe for their persistence in encouraging me tor et ur n to a n essay I h ad all bu t abandoned. I am grateful to all.

The opening quotation is from Graham Swift, Waterland New York 1983), 53-54.

Paul Bonnifield, The us t Bowl: Men Dirt nd Depression Albuquerque, 1979); Donald Worster, DustBowl: The Southern Plains in th e 1930s New York 1979). On Dust Bowl historiography in general, see the collection of essays in Great Plains Quarterly 6 Spring 1986).

The Journal of American History March 1992 1347


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1348 The Journal of American History March 1992

In the final analysis the story of the dust bowl was the story of people peoplewith ability and talent people with resourcefulness fortitude and courage The people of the dust bowl were not defeated poverty-ridden people withouthope. They were builders for tomorrow. During those hard years they continuedto build their churches their businesses their schools their colleges their communities. They grew closer to God and fonder of the land. Hard years were commonin their past but the future belonged to those who were ready to seize the mo-ment. . . . Because they stayed during those hard years and worked the land andtapped her natural resources millions of people have eaten better worked inhealthier places and enjoyed warmer homes. Because those determined peopledid not flee the stricken area during a crisis the nation today enjoys a better standard of living.

Worster on the other hand paints a bleaker picture:

The Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of thesouthern plains. The name suggests a place - a region whose borders are as inexactand shifting as a sand dune. But it was also an event of national even planetarysignificance. A widely respected authority on world food problems George Borg-

strom has ranked the creation ofthe Dust Bowl as one ofthe three worst ecologicalblunders in history. . . . cannot be blamed on illiteracy or overpopulation orsocial disorder. came about because the culture was operating in precisely theway it was supposed to The Dust Bowl w the inevitable outcome ofa culture that deliberately self consciously set itself[the] task of dominating andexploiting the land for all it was worth. 3

For Bonnifield th e dust storms of th e 1930s were mainly a natural disaster; whenth e rains gave out people ha d to struggle for their farms their homes their verysurvival. Their success in that struggle was a triumph of individual an d communityspirit: nature made a mess an d human beings cleaned it up. Worster s version differsdramatically. lthough th e rains di d fail during the 1930s their disappearance ex-pressed th e cyclical climate of a semiarid environment. The story of t he D us t Bowlis less about the failures of nature than about the failures ofhuman beings to accommodate themselves to nature. A long series of willful human misunderstandingsan d assaults led finally to a collapse whose origins were mainly cultural.

Whichever of these interpretations we are inclined to follow they pose a dilemmafor scholars who s tudy pas t envi ronmenta l change- indeed a dilemma for allhistorians. As often happens in history they make us wonder how two competentauthors looking at identical materials drawn from th e same past can reach suchdivergent conclusions. B ut it is no t merely their conclusions that differ. lthoughboth narrate th e same broad series of events with an essentially similar cast ofcharacters they tell two entirely different stories In both texts th e story is inextricably bound to its conclusion a nd t he historical analysis derives much of its forcefrom th e upward or downward sweep of th e plot. So we must eventually ask a morebasic question: where di d these stories come from?

2 Bonnifield The Dust Bowl 2023 Worster Dust Bowl


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Nature, History, and Narrative 1349

The question is trickier than it seems, for it transports us into the much contestedterrain between traditional social science and postmodernist critical theory. As anenvironmental historian who tries to blend the analytical traditions of history withthose of ecology, economics, anthropology, and other fields, I cannot help feelinguneasy about the shifting theoretical ground we all now seem to occupy. n theone hand, a fundamental premise of my field is that human acts occur within a network of relationships, processes, and systems that are as ecological as they are cultural. To such basic historical categories as gender, class, and race, environmentalhistorians would add a theoretical vocabulary in which plants, animals, soils, l -mates, and other nonhuman entities become the coactors and codeterminants ofa history not just of people b u to f the earth itself. For scholars who share my perspective, the importance of the natural world, its objective effects on people, and theconcrete ways people affect it in turn are n ot at issu they are the very heart of ourintellectual project. We therefore ally our historical work with that of our colleaguesin the sciences, whose models, however imperfectly, try to approximate the mechanisms of nature. 4

And yet scholars of environmental history also maintain a powerful commitmentto narrative form. When we describe human activities within an ecosystem, we seemalways to tell stories about them. 5 Like all historians, we configure the events of thepast into causal sequences stories that order and simplify those events to givethem new meanings. We do so because narrative is the chief literary form that triesto find meaning in an overwhelmingly crowded and disordered chronologicalreality. When we choose a plot to order our environmental histories, we give thema unity that neither nature nor the past possesses so clearly. In so doing, we movewell beyond nature into the intensely human realm of value. There, we cannot avoidencountering the postmodernist assault on narrative, which calls into question notjust the stories we tell but the deeper purpose that motivated us in the first place:trying to make sense of nature s place in the human past.

By writing stories about environmental change, we divide the causal relationshipsof an ecosystem with a rhetorical razor that defines included and excluded, relevantand irrelevant, empowered and disempowered. In the act of separating story fromnon-story, we wield the most powerful yet dangerous tool of the narrative form. Itis a commonplace of modern literary theory that the very authority with which narrative presents its vision of reality is achieved by obscuring large portions of thatreality. Narrative succeeds to the extent that it hides the discontinuities, ellipses,

4 For a wide-ranging discussion that explores the emerging intellectual agendas of environmental history, see Round Table: Environmental History Journal o American History 76 (March 1990), 1087-1147.

, Throughout this essay I will use story and narrative interchangeably, despite a technical distinction thatcan be made between them. For some literary critics and philosophers of history, story is a limited genre, whereasnarrative (or narratio is the much more encompassing part of classical rhetoric that organizes all representationsof time into a configured sequence of completed actions. I intend the broader meaning for both words, since storytelling in its most fundamental sense is the activity I wish to criticize an d defend. I hope it is emphaticallyclear at the outset that I am ot urging a return to traditional narrative history that revolves around the biographies of great individuals (usually elite white male politicians and intellectuals); rather, I am urging historiansto acknowledge storytelling as the necessary core even of longue duree histories that pay little attention to individual people. Environmental history is bu t one example of these, and most of my arguments apply just as readilyto the others.


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and contradictory experiences that would undermine the intended meaning of itsstory. Whatever its overt purpose, it cannot avoid a covert exercise of power: it inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others. A powerful narrative reconstructs common sense to make the contingent seem determined and the artificialseem natural. f this is true, then narrative poses particularly difficult problems for

environmental historians, for whom the boundary between the artificial and thenatural is the very thing we most wish to study. The differences between Bonnifield sand Worster s versions of the Dust Bowl clearly have something to do with that boundary, as does my own uneasiness about the theoretical underpinnings of my historical craft. 6

The disease of literary theory is to write too much in abstractions, so that eventhe simplest meanings become difficult if not downright opaque. Lest this essaywander off into litcrit fog, let me ground it on more familiar terrain. I propose toexamine the role of narrative in environmental history by returning to the GreatPlains to survey the ways historians have told that region s past. What I offer herewill no t be a comprehensive historiography, since my choice of texts is eclectic andI will ignore many major works. Rather, I will use a handful of Great Plains histories

to explore the much vexed problems that narrative poses for all historians. On theone hand, I hope to acknowledge the deep challenges that postmodernism posesfor those who applaud the revival of narrative ; on the other, I wish to record myown conviction-chastened but still strong that narrative remains essential to ourunderstanding of history and the human place in nature.

f we consider the Plains in th e half millennium since Christopher Columbuscrossed the Atlantic, certain events seem likely to stand out in any long-term historyof the region. f I were to try to write these not as a story but as a simple l i s t Iwill not entirely succeed in so doing, since the task of not telling stories about thepast turns out to be much more difficult than it may seem- the resulting chroniclemight run something like this.

Five centuries ago, people traveled west across the Atlantic Ocean. So did someplants and animals. One of these the horse appeared on the Plains. Nativepeoples used horses to hunt bison. Human migrants from across the Atlantic even-

6 Much of the reading that lies behind this essay cannot easily be attached to a single argument or footnote.Among the works that helped shape my views on the importance and problems of narrative are the following:William H. Dray, Philosophy o f History (Englewood Cliffs, 1964); Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Natureo f Narrative (New York, 1966); Frank Kermode, The Sense o f an Ending: Studies in the Theory o f Fiction (NewYork, 1967); Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore,1973); Hayden White, Tropics o f Discourse: Essays in CulturalCriticism (Baltimore, 1978); Robert H. Canary andHenry Kozicki, eds., The Writing o f History: Literary Form an d Historical Understanding (Madison, 1978); W. T.Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago, 1981 ; FredricJameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a SociallySymbolic ct (Ithaca, 1981);JonathanCuller, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism afterStructuralism (Ithaca,1982); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: n Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983); Paul Ricoeur, Time an d Narrative 3 vols., Chicago, 1984, 1985, 1988), trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer; Dominick LaCapra, RethinkingIntellectual History: Texts Contexts Language (Ithaca, 1983); Arthur C. Danto, Narration an d Knowledge: Including the Integral Text o f Analytical Philosophy o f History (New York, 1985); James Clifford and George E.Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics an d Politics o f Ethnography (Berkeley, 1986); Wallace Martin, RecentTheories o f Narrative (Ithaca, 1986); Louis O. Mink, Historical Understanding (Ithaca, 1987); Hayden White, TheContent o f the Form Narrative Discourse an d Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987); and Kai Erikson, Obituary for Big Daddy: A Parable: unpublished manuscript (in William Cronon s possession).


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we might apply to the events I ve just chronicled is endless and could be drawn notjust from history bu t from all of literature and myth. To simplify the range ofchoices, let me start by offering two large groups of possible plots. On the one hand,we can narrate Plains history as a story of improvement, in which th e plot line gradu

ally ascends toward an ending that is somehow more positive- happier, richer, freer,bet ter than the beginning. On the other hand, we can tell stories in which theplot line eventually falls toward an ending that is more negative-sadder, poorer,less free, worse - than the placewhere th e story began. The one group of plots mightbe called progressive, given their historical dependence on eighteenth-century Enlightenment notions of progress; the other might be called tragic or declensionist, tracing their historical roots to romantic an d antimodernist reactionsagainst progress.

f we look at the ways historians have actually written about the changing environment of the Great Plains, the upward and downward lines of progress and declension are everywhere apparent. The very ease with which we recognize them constitutes a warning about the terrain we are entering. However compelling these stories

may be as depictionsof

environmental change, their narrative form has less to dowith nature than with human discourse. Their plots are cultural constructions sodeeply embedded in our language that they resonate far beyond the Great Plains.Historians did not invent them, and their very familiarity encourages us to shapeour storytelling to fit their patterns. Placed in a particular historical or ideologicalcontext, neither group of plots is innocent: both have hidden agendas that influencewhat the narrative includes and excludes. So powerful are these agendas that noteven the historian as author entirely controls them.

Take for instance, the historians who narrate Great Plains history as a tale of frontier progress. The most famous of those who embraced this basic plot was of courseFrederick Jackson Turner, for whom the story of the nat ion recapi tulated theascending stages of European civilization to produce a uniquely democratic and

egalitarian community. Turner saw the transformation of the American landscapefrom wilderness to trading post to farm to boomtown as the central saga of the nation. 9 f ever there was a narrative that achieved its en d by erasing its true subject,Turner s frontier was it: the heroic encounter between pioneers and free land couldonly become plausible by obscuring the conquest that traded one people s freedomfor another s. By making Indians the foil for its story of progress, the frontier plotmade their conquest seem natural, commonsensical, inevitable. But to say this isonly to affirm the narrative s power In countless versions both before and after itacquired its classic Turnerian form, this story of frontier struggle and progress re-mains among the oldest an d most familiar narratives of American history. In itsability to turn ordinary people into heroes and to present a conflict-ridden invasionas an epic march toward enlightened democratic nationhood, it perfectly fulfilled

the ideological needs of its late-nineteenth-century moment.IO

9 Frederick Jackson Turner, The rontier in merican History (New York 1920), 1210 I have written a b ou t t h e rhetorical structure of Turner s work in two essays: William Cronan, Revisiting th e

Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy ofFrederickJackson Turner, western istorical Quarterly 18 (April 1987), 157-76;


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Nature, History and Narrative 1353

The Great Plains would eventually prove less tractable to frontier progress thanmany other parts of th e nation. Turner himselfwould say of the region t ha t i t constituted the American farmer s first defeat, bu t tha t d idn t stop th e settlers themselves from narrating their past with the frontier story.u One of Dakota Territory sleading missionaries, Bishop William Robert Hare, prophesied in th e 1880s that theplot of Dakota settlement would follow an upward line of migration, struggle, an dtriumph:

You may stand ankle deep in the short burnt grass of an uninhabited wildernessnext month a mixed train will glide over the waste and stop at some point wherethe railroad has decided to locate a town. Men women and children will jumpout ofthe cars and their chattel will be tumbled out after them. From that moment the building begins. The courage and faith of these pioneers are somethingextraordinary. Their spirit seems to rise above all obstacles.

For Hare, this vision of progress was ongoing an d prospective, a prophecy of futuregrowth, bu t the same pattern could just as easily be applied to retrospective visions. n early historian of Oklahoma, Luther Hill, could look back in 1909 at the 1890s,a decade t ha t h ad wrought a great change in Oklahoma terr itory : in a mere te nyears, settlers ha d transformed th e stagnant pool of unused Indian lands into th e waving grain fields, the herds of cattle, an d the broad prospect of agriculturalprosperity [which] cause delight an d even surprise in the beholder who sees theresults of civilization in producing such marvels of wealth. Ordinary people sawsuch descriptions as the fulfillment of a grand story t ha t h ad unfolded during thecourse of their own lifetimes. As one Kansas townswoman, Josephine Middlekauf,concluded,

After sixty years of pioneering in Hays I could write volumes telling of its growthand progress I have been singularly privileged to have seen it developfrom theraw materials into the almost finished product in comfortable homes, churches

schools paved streets, trees fruits and flowers.14

Consider these small narratives more abstractly. They tell a story of more or lesslinear progress, in which people struggle to transform a relatively responsive environment . There may be moderate setbacks along th e way bu t their narrative roleis to play foil to th e heroes who overcome them. Communities rapidly succeed inbecoming ever more civilized an d comfortable. Th e t ime frame of th e stories isbrief, l imited to the lifespan of a single generation, an d is located historically int he moment just after invading settlers first occupied Indian lands. Our attention

and William Cronon, Turner s First Stand: The Significance of Significance in American History: in Writingwestern History Classic Essays on Classic western Historians ed. Richard Etulain (Albuquerque, 1991 73-101.See also Ronald H. Carpenter, The Eloquence Frederick Jackson Turner (San Marino, 1983).

11 Turner, Frontier in American History 4712 William Robert Hare, ca. 1887, as quoted in Howard R. Lamar, Public Values and Private Dreams: South

Dakota s Search for Identity, 1850-1900: South Dakota History 8 (Spring 1978), 129.13 Luther B. Hill, A History the State Oklahoma (Chicago, 1909), 382, 386, 385.14 Josephine Middlekauf, as quoted inJoanna 1. Stratton, Pioneer Women Voices from the Kansas Frontier

(New York 1981 204.


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1354 Th e Journal of American History March 1992

as readers is focused on local events, those affecting individuals, families, townships,and other small communities. All of these framing devices, which are as literary asthey are historical, compel us toward the conclusion that this is basically a happystory. is tempered only by a h in t o f nostalgia for th e world that is being lost, aquiet undercurrent of elderly regret for youthful passions and energies now fading.

f the story these narrators tell is about the drama of settlement and the courageof pioneers, it is just as much about the changing stage on which the drama playsitself out. The transformation of a Kansas town is revealed not just by its newbuildings but by its shade trees, apple orchards, and gardens; the triumphantprosperity of Oklahoma resides in its wheat fields, cattle pastures, and oil derricks.As the literary critic Kenneth Burke long ago suggested, the scene of a story is asfundamental to what happens in it as the actions that comprise its more visible plot.Indeed, Burke argues that a story s actions are almost invariably consistent with itsscene: there is implicit in the quality of a scene he writes, the quality of the ac-tion that is to take place within it. 15

f the way a narrator constructs a scene is directly related to the story that narratortells, then this has deep implications for environmental history, which after all takesscenes of past nature as its primary object of study. f the history of the Great Plainsis a progressive story about how grasslands were turned into ranches, farms, andgardens, then the end of the story requires a particular kind of scene for theascending plot line to reach its necessary fulfillment. Just as important, the closingscene has to be different from the opening one. f th e story ends in a wheatfieldthat is the happy conclusion of a struggle to transform the landscape, then the mostbasic requirement of the story is that the earlier form of that landscape must eitherbe neutral or negative in value. must deserve to be transformed.

is thus no accident that these storytellers begin their narratives in the midstof landscapes that have few redeeming features. Bishop Hare s Dakota Territorybegins as an uninhabited wilderness, and his railroad carries future settlers acrossa waste. Just so does narrative revalue nature by turning i t into scenery andpushing to its margins such characters as Indians who play no role in the story orrather, whose roles the story is designed to obscure. When Luther Hill s Oklahomawas still controlled by Indians, it remained a stagnant pool, whileJosephine Middlekauf perceived the unplowed Kansas grasslands chiefly as raw materials. Even soseemingly neutral a phrase as this last one ~ r wm t e r i l s ~is freighted with narrative meaning. Indeed, it contains buried within it the entire story of progressive development in which the environment is transformed from raw materials to finished product. In just this way story and scene become entangled with eachother, and with the politics of invasion and civilized progress - as we try to understand the Plains environment and its history.

Now in fact, these optimistic stories about Great Plains settlement are by nomeans typical of historical writing in the twentieth century. The problems of settlinga semiarid environment were simply too great for th e frontier story to proceed

Kenneth Burke. rammar Motives (Berkeley, 1969). 6-7.


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without multiple setbacks and crises. Even narrators who prefer an ascending plotline in their stories of regional environmental change must therefore tell a morecomplicated tale of failure, struggle, and accommodation in the face of a resistantif not hostile landscape.

Among the most important writers who adopt this narrative strategy are WalterPrescott Webb and James Malin, the two most influential historians of the GreatPlains to write during the first half of the twentieth century. Webb s classic work,The Great Plains was published over half a century ago and has remained in printto this day I6 tells a story that significantly revises the Turnerian frontier. ForWebb, the Plains were radically different from the more benign environments thatAnglo-American settlers had encountered in the East. Having no trees and littlewater, the region posed an almost insurmountable obstacle to the westward marchof civilization. After describing the scene in this way Webb sets his story in motionwith a revealing passage:

In the new region level timberless, and semi-arid - [settlers] were thrown byMother Necessity into the clutch of new circumstances. Their plight has been

stated in this way: east of the Mississippi civilization stood on three legs landwater, and timber; west of the Mississippi not one but two of these legs were withdrawn,-water and timber and civilization w left on one leg land. is smallwonder that it toppled over in temporary failure 17

is easy to anticipate the narrative that will flow from this beginning: Webb willtell us how civilization fell over then built itself new legs and regained its footingto continue its triumphant ascent. The central agency that solves these problemsand drives the story forward is human invention. Unlike the simpler frontier narratives, Webb s history traces a dialectic between a resistant landscape and the technological innovations that will finally succeed in transforming it. Although his bookis over five hundred pages long an d is marvelously intricate in its arguments, certaingreat inventions mark the turning points of Webb s plot. Because water was so scarce,settlers had to obtain it from the only reliable source, underground aquifers, so theyinvented the humble bu t revolutionary windmill. Because so little wood was available to build fences that would keep cattle out of cornfields, barbed wire was invented in 1874 and rapidly spread throughout th e grasslands. These and otherinventions- railroads, irrigation, new legal systems for allocating water rights, evensix-shooter revolvers - eventually destroyed the bison herds, created a vast cattlekingdom, and broke the prairie sod for farming.

Webb closes his story by characterizing the Plains as a land of survival wherenature has most stubbornly resisted the efforts of man. Nature s very stubbornnesshas driven man to the innovations which he has made. Is Given the scenic requirements of Webb s narrative, his Plains landscape must look rather different from thatof earlier frontier narrators. For Webb, the semiarid environment is neither a wilder-

16 Walter Prescott Webb. The Great Plains (New York 1931).17 Ibid 9. Ibid 508.


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occupy the grasslands, though, there is no explicit backward extension of the t imeframe. The precontact history of the Indians is no t p rt of this story.

Most interestingly, the hum n subject of these stories has become significantlybroader than the earlier state and local frontier histories. Rather than focus primarily

on individual pioneers and their communities, these new regional studies centertheir story on civilization or man. The inventions that allowed people to adaptto life on the Great Plains are thus absorbed into the broader story of man nd his long conquest of nature. No narrative centered on so singular a centralcharacter could be politically innocent. More erasures are at work here: Indians, yesbut also women, ethnic groups, underclasses, nd any other communities th t havebeen set apart from th e collectivity represented by Man or Civilization. The narrative leaves little room for them, nd even less for a na tura l realm tha t might appropriately be spared the conquests of technology. These are stories about a progressthat, however hard-earned, is fated; its conquests are only what common sense andnature would expect. For Webb and Malin, the Great Plains gain significance fromtheir ties to a world-historical plot, Darwinian in shape, th t encompasses the entire

sweep of hum n history. The ascending plot line we detect in these stories is in factconnected to a much longer plot line with the same rising characteristics. Whetherth t longer plot is expressed as the Making of the American Nation, the Rise ofWestern Civilization, or the Ascent of Man, it still lends its grand scale to GreatPlains histories that outwardly appear much more limited in form. This may explainhow we can find ourselves so entranced by a book whose principal subject for fivehundred pages is the invention of windmills and barbed wire.

But there is another way to tell this history, one in which th e plot ultimately fallsrather than rises. The first examples of what we might call a declensionist or tragic Great Plains history began to appear during the u st Bowl calamity of the1930s The dominant New Deal interpretat ion of what had gone wrong on thePlains was that settlers had been fooled by a climate th t was sometimes perfectly

adequate for farming nd at other times disastrously inadequate. Settlement hadexpanded during good years when rainfall was abundant, n d t he perennial optimism of the frontier h d prevented farmers from acknowledging th t drought wasa permanent fact of life on the Plains. In this version, Great Plains history becomesa tale of self-deluding hubris nd refusal to accept reality. Only strong governmentaction, planned by enlightened scientific experts to encourage cooperation amongPlains farmers, could prevent future agricultural expansion nd a return of the duststorms.

The classic early statement of this narrative is th t of the committee th t FranklinD Roosevelt appointed to investigate the causes of the Dust Bowl, in its 1936 reporton The uture the Great Plains Its version of the region s history up until the1930s runs as follows:

The steady progress whichwe have come to look for in American communities wasbeginning to reverse itself Instead of becoming more productive, the Great Plains


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1358 The] ouenal of American History March 1992

The Great Plains of the Past an illustration for The Future the Great Plains 1936 .

This and its companion illustrations on the following pages illustrate the New Dealstory of the Great Plains. The capt ion for this one reads. in part, ~ the first

white settlers drove their covered wagons slowly westward they foundthe Red Man living in rude bu t productive harmony with Nature.

were becoming less so. Instead of giving their population a better standard ofliving, they were tending to give them a poorer one. The people were energeticand courageous, and they loved their land. Yet they were increasingly less securein it. 21

On e did no t have to look far to locate th e reason for this unexpected reversal of th eAmerican success story. Plains settlers ha d failed in precisely th e agricultural adaptations that Webb an d Malin claimed for them Radical steps would have to be taken

if the ust Bowl disaster were no t to repeat itself. t became clear said th e

21 The Future the Great Plains: Report the Great Plains ommittee Washington, 1936), 1. On thisreport,see Gilbert White, The Future the Great Plains Re-Visited, Great Plains Quarterly, 6 Spring 1986), 84-93.


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Nature, History and Narrative

The Great Plains of the Present.The original caption was in part , The White Man carne as a conqueror first of the

Indian, then of Nature The plough ignores Nature s Keep Off signs;communities, for all the courage of their people, fall into decay.

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planners, describing their own controversial conclusions with the settled authorityof the past tense, that unless there was a permanent change in the agricultural pat-tern of the Plains, relief always would have to be extended whenever the availablerainfall was deficient. 22

Whatever the scientific or political merits of this description, consider its narrativeimplications. The New Deal planners in effect argued that the rising plot line ofour earlier storytellers not only was false u t was itself the principal cause of the

environmental disaster that unfolded during the 1930s. The Dust Bowl had oc-curred because people had been telling themselves the wrong story and had tried

uture the Great Plains 1.


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1360 The] ournal of American History March 1992

The Great Plains of the Future.The original caption was in part , The land may bloom again if man once more makes his

peace with Nature. Careful planting will give him back the foothill trees; fewer and larger farms on scientifically selected sites may yield a comfortable living This is no Utopian dream. is a

promise, to be realized we will.

to inscribe that story the frontier on a landscape incapable of supporting it. 3The environmental rhythms of the Plains ecosystem were cyclical with good yearsand bad years following each other like waves on a beach. The problem of humansettlement in the region was that people insisted on imposing their linear notionsof progress on this cyclical pattern. Their perennial optimism led them always toaccept as normal the most favorable part of the precipitation cycle and so they

created a type and scale of agriculture that could not possibly be sustained through

This image of colonial invaders seeking to inscribe their ideology on an alien landscape isone of the centralnotions of a fascinating monograph: Tzvetan Todorov, h onquest merica New York, 1984).


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the dry years In effect, bad storytelling had wreaked havoc with the balance ofnature.

By this interpretation, the plot of Great Plains history rises as Euroamericansettlement begins, bu t the upward motion becomes problematic as farmers exceed

the natural limits of the ecosystem. From that moment forward, the story movestoward a climax in which the tragic flaws of a self-deluding people finally yield crisisand decline. Although the geographical and chronological frame of this narrativeare much the same as in the earlier progressive plots, the scene has shifted dramatically For Webb and Malin, the Plains environment was resistant bu t changeable,so that struggle and ingenuity would finally make it conform to the human will.In this early New Deal incarnation of a pessimistic Great Plains history, the environment was not only resistant bu t in some fundamental ways unchangeable. Its mostimportant characteristics-cyclical drought and aridity could not be altered byhuman technology; they could only be accommodated. f the story was still abouthuman beings learning to live in the grasslands, its ultimate message was aboutgaining the wisdom to recognize and accept natural limits rather than strive to over-

come them. Although the close of the New Deal committee s story still lay in thefuture when its report was released in 1936, its authors clearly intended readers toconclude that the only appropriate ending was for Americans to reject optimisticstories such as Webb s and Malin s in favor of environmental restraint and soundmanagement.

The political subtext of this story is no t hard to find. Whereas the heroes of earlierGreat Plains narratives had been the courageous and inventive poeple who settledthe region, the New Dealers constructed their stories so as to place themselves oncenter stage. Plainspeople, for all their energy, courage, and love of the land, wereincapable of solving their own problems without help. They had made such a messof their environment that only disinterested outsiders, offering the enlightened perspective of scientific management, could save them from their own folly In this

sense, the New Deal narrative is only partially tragic, for in fact the planners stillintended a happy ending. Like Webb and Malin, they saw the human story on thePlains as a tale of adaptation, bu t their vision of progressive modernization endedin regional coordination and centralized state planning. Federal planners would aidlocal communities in developing new cooperative insti tu tions and a more sus-tainable relation to the land. This was the conclusion of Pare Lorentz s famous NewDeal propaganda film, The low th t roke th lains (1936), in which a seeminglyinevitable environmental collapse is finally reversed by government intervention.Technology, education, cooperation, and state power- not individualism - wouldbring Plains society back into organic balance with Plains nature and thereby averttragedy to produce a happy ending.

Seen in this light, James Malin s storytelling takes on new meaning. Malin wrote

in the wake of the New Deal and was a staunch conservative opponent of everythingit represented. His narratives of regional adaptation expressed his own horror of collectivism by resisting the New Deal story at virtually every turn. The planners, hesaid, ha d exaggerated the severity of the Dust Bowl to serve their own statist ends


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and had ignored the fact that dust storms had been a natural part of the Plains environment as far back as anyone remembered. Their scientistic faith in ecology hadgrave political dangers, for the ecologists had themselves gone astray in viewing thePlains environment as a stable, self-equilibrating organism in which human actioninevitably disturbed the balance of nature. 24 Ecosystems were dynamic, and so wasthe human story of technological progress: to assert that nature set insurmountablelimits to human ingenuity was to deny the whole upward sweep of civilized history.The New Dealers affection for stories in which nature and society were metaphorically cast as organisms only revealed their own hostility to individualism and theirflirtation with communist notions of the state. Scientism, Malin declared, alongwith statism, have become major social myths that threaten freedom. 25

If the New Dealers Great Plains was a constrained environment forcing inhabitants to accept its natural limits, Malin s was a landscape of multiple possibilities,a stage for human freedom. The story of the one began in balance, moved intochaos, and then returned to the wiser balance of a scientifically planned society. Thestory of the other had no such prophetic return to an organic whole bu t expressedinstead a constant process of readaptation that continued the long march of humanimprovement that was the core plot of Malin s history. In both cases, the shape ofthe landscape conformed to the human narratives that were set within it and so became the terrain upon which their different politics contested each other. Malin scommitment to individualist freedom led him to probe more deeply into grasslandecology than any historian before him, but always in an effort to find human possibilities rather than natural limits. The scene he constructed for his story was an environment that responded well to human needs unless misguided bureaucrats interfered with people s efforts to adapt themselves to the land.

is James Malin s anti-New Deal narrative that informs Paul Bonnifield s The u st Bowl Writing in the late 1970s, at a time when conservative critiques of thewelfare state were becoming a dominant feature of American political discourse,Bonnifield argues less urgently and polemically than Malin, bu t he tells essentiallythe same story. For him, the Great Plains did pose special problems to the peoplewho settled there, bu t no one grappled with those problems more successfully thanthey. When the Dust Bowl hit, it was the people who lived there, not governmentscientists, who invented new land-use practices that solved earlier problems. NewDeal planners understood litt le about the region and were so caught up in theirown ideology that they compounded its problems by trying to impose their visionof a planned society.

Rather than allow residents to come up with their own solutions, Bonnifieldargues, the planners used every means possible to drive farmers from their land.They did this not to address the environmental problems of the Plains, bu t to solvetheir own problem of reducing the national overproduction of wheat. To justify thisdeceit, they caricatured Plains inhabitants as defeated, poverty-ridden peoplewithout hope in such propaganda as The Plow that Broke the Plains and the Farm

24 On the role of the Dust Bowl in reshaping the science of ecology itself, see Ronald C. Tobey, Saving thePrairies: The Life Cycle o the Founding School o American Plant Ecology 1895-1955 (Berkeley, 1981 .

Malin, Grassland o North America 68


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Security Administration photographs, with their mini-narratives of environmentaldestruction an d social despair. 26 In fact, Bonnifield argues, the Plains containedsome of th e best farming soil in th e world. The landscape was difficult bu t ultimately benign for people who could learn to thrive upon it . Their chief problemwas less a hostile narure than a hostile government. The narrative echoes Malin sscenic landscape bu t gains a different kind of ideological force when placed at thehistorical moment of its narrat ion- in th e waning years of the Carter administrationjust prior to Ronald Reagan s triumphant election as president. Bonnifield s is a taleof ordinary folk needing nothing so much as to get government off their backs.

If Bonnifield elaborates the optimistic Dust Bowl narrative of a conservative criticof the New Deal, Donald Worster returns to the New Deal p lo t and deepens itstragic possibilities. Worster, who is with Webb the most powerful narrator amongthese writers, accepts the basic framework of Roosevelt s planners the refusal oflinear-minded Americans to recognize and accept cyclical environmental constraints - bu t he shears away its statist bias an d considerably expands its culturalboundaries. One consequence of the New Deal tale was to remove the history of

th e Plains from its role in th e long-term ascent of civilization; instead, the regionbecame merely an unfortunate anomaly that imposed unusual constraints on the steady progress that was otherwise typical of American life. Worster rejects thisreading of Plains history an d argues instead t ha t t he Plains were actually a paradigmatic case in a larger story that might be called t he rise and fall of capitalism.

For Worster, th e refusal to recognize natural limits is one of the defining characteristics of a capitalist ethos and economy. He is therefore drawn to a narrative inwhich the same facts that betokened progress for Webb an d Malin become signsof declension an d of th e compounding contradictions of capitalist expansion. Thescene of the story is world historical, only this time the plot leads toward catastrophe:

That the thirties were a time of great crisis in American, indeed, in worldcapitalism has long been an obvious fact The Dust Bowl believe w part ofthat same crisis came about because the expansionary energy of the UnitedStates had finally encountered a volatile marginal land, destroying the delicateecological balance that had evolved there. We speak of farmers and plows on theplains and the damage they did, but the language is inadequate. What broughtthem to the region was a social system a set of values an economic order Thereis no word that so fully sums up those elements as capitalism. Capitalism,it is my contention, has been the decisive factor in this nation s use of nature. 27

By this reading, the chiefagent of the story is not t he pioneers or civilizationor man ; i t is capitalism. The plot leads from the origins of that economic system,through a series of crises, toward th e future environmental cataclysm when thesystem will finally collapse. The tale of Worster s Dust Bowl thus concerns an intermediate crisis that foreshadows other crises yet to come; in this, i t proclaims anapocalyptic prophecy that inverts th e prophecy of progress found in earlier frontiernarratives. Worster s inversion of th e frontier story is deeply ironic, for it implies that

16 Bonnifield, The u t Bowl 20227 Worster u t Bowl 5


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the increasing technological control represented by Webb s an d Malin s humaningenuity leads only toward an escalating spiral of disasters. He also breaks rank withthe New Dealers at this point, for in his view their efforts at solving the problemsof the Dust Bowl did nothing to address the basic contradictions of capitalism itself.For Worster, the planners propped up an agricultural economy that had proveditself to be socially and ecologically erosive 28

Given how much his basic plot differs from Webb s and Malin s, the scene Worsterconstructs for his narrative must differ just as dramatically. Since Worster s story concerns the destruction of an entire ecosystem, it must end where the frontier storybegan: in a wasteland. His plot must move downward toward an ecological disastercalled the Dust Bowl Whereas the frontier narratives begin in a negatively valuedlandscape and end in a positive one, Worster begins his tale in a place whose narrative value is entirely good. His grasslands are an old and unique ecological com-plex that nature had struggled for millions of years to achieve, determining bytrial and error what would flourish best in this dry corner of the good earth 29 Delicate and beautiful, the Plains were an ecosystem living always on the edge ofdrought, and their survival depended on an intricate web of plants and animals thatcapitalism was incapable of valuing by any standard other than that of the marketplace. From this beginning, the story moves down a slope t ha t ends in the duststorms whose narrative role is to stand as the most vivid possible symbol of humanalienation from nature.

The very different scenes that progressive and declensionist narrators choose asthe settings for their Great Plains histories bring us to another key observation aboutnarrative itself: where one chooses to begin and end a story profoundly alters itsshape and meaning. Worster s is not, after all, the only possible plot that can organize Great Plains history into a tale of crisis and decline. Because his metanarrativehas to do with the past and future of capitalism, his time frame, like that of thefrontier storytellers, remains tied to the start of white settlement the moment

when the American plot of progress or decline begins its upward or downwardsweep Although he acknowledges the prior presence of Indians in the region, hedevotes only a few pages to them. They are clearly peripheral to his narrative. Thisis true of all the stories we have examined thus far, for reasons that have as muchto do with narrative rhetoric as with historical analysis. In their efforts to meet thenarrative requirements that define a well-told ta le organic unity, a clear focus, andonly the relevant details these historians have little to say about the region s earlier human inhabitants. They therefore ignore th e entire first half of my originalchronicle of key events in Great Plains history. If we shift t ime frames to encompass the Indian past, we suddenly encounter a new set of narratives, equallytragic in their sense of crisis and declension, but strikingly different in plot andscene. As such, they offer further proof of the narrative power to reframe the past

soas

to include certain events and people, exclude others, and redefine the meaningof landscape accordingly. 8 Ibid 6329 Ibid 66


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One can detect this process of inclusion and exclusion in the passing referencesthat progressive frontier narrators make to the prior, less happy stories of Indians.Sometimes, the tone of such references is elegiac and melancholy, as in the classicimage of a vanishing race ; sometimes the tone is simply dismissive. As Webb pu tit, The Plains Indians were survivals of savagery and when there was nowhereelse to push them they were permitted to settle down on the reservations. 3o Ifprogressive change was inevitable, then so too was the eventual death or removalof the Indians. Their marginalization is thus a necessary requirement of the narrative. The feature of the environment that served as the best scenic indicator of thisinevitability was the American bison, whose destruction was among the most crucialsteps in undermining Indian subsistence. Even if one did not feel favorably disposedtoward Indians, one could still mourn the bison. Webb again: The Great Plainsafforded the last virgin hunting grounds in America, and it was there that the mostcharacteristic American animal made its last stand against the advance of the whiteman s civilization. 31

These passing references to Indian pre-history are essentially framing devices,

the purpose of which is to set the stage for the more important drama that is soonto follow. Historians who focus more centrally on Indians in their narratives almostinevitably construct very different plots from the ones I have described thus far.Among such scholars, one of the most sophisticated is Richard White. Althoughhis work too can be seen as a metaplot about the expansion of capitalism, the landscape he constructs is defined by Indian stories. White s narrative of Pawnee history,for instance, begins with a people living in the mixed grasslands on the easternmargins of the Plains, dividing their activities in a seasonally shifting cycle offarming, gathering, and bison hunting. As one would expect of a declensionist plot,the initial scene is basically a benign and fruitful landscape, despite occasionallysevere droughts. At the moment that the Pawnees began their encounter with Euroamerican culture first with the arrival of the horse, then with the fur trade - the

Plains environment was furnishing them a comfortable subsistence. In narrativeterms, its meaning was that of a much-loved home.The downward line of White s narrative records the steady erosion of the

Pawnees landscape. European disease wiped out much of their population. The ex-panding Sioux tribes made i t harder for them to hunt bison and raise crops. Ashunting became more difficult, the material and spiritual underpinnings of Pawneesubsistence began to disintegrate. Pawnee life was increasingly in crisis, and by theIS70s when the great herds were finally destroyed the tribe was forced toabandon its traditional homeland and remove to Indian Territory. The story endsas a classic tragedy of exodus and despair: When the Pawnees decided to leave the

30 Webb, Great Plains 50831 Ibid. 509. For a similar use of the bison story as the symbol of an earlier Indian world that in some sense vanished during the last third of the nineteenth century, see William Cronon, Nature s Metropolis: Chicago n

the Great west (New York 1991), 213-18.32 Richard White, The Roots o f Dependency: Subsistence Environment n Social Change among the

Choctaws Pawnees n Navajos (Lincoln, 1983), 147-211.


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1366 The] ournal of American History March 1992

Loup Valley it was in the hope that to the south in Indian territory lay a land wherethey could hunt the buffalo, grow corn, and let the old life of the earthlodges flowerbeyond the reach of the Sioux and American settlers. 33 Unfortunately, this hopedfor ending to the Pawnee story would never be achieved, because the scene it re-quired no longer existed. As White says Such a land had disappeared forever. 34

The frame of this story differs from anything we have seen thus far. t ends atthe moment most of the other plots begin. t starts much further back in time, asEuropean animals and trade goods begin to change the Plains landscape, offeringopportunities and improvements in Pawnee life. Eventually a downward spiralbegins, and the tragedy of the narrative becomes unrelenting as the Pawnees losecontrol of their familiar world. As for the scene of this plot, we have already encountered it in a different guise. The wilderness in which the progressive frontier narrators begin their stories is nothing less than the destroyed remnant of th e Pawneeshome. t is less a wasteland than a land tha t has been wasted.

Narratives of this sort are by no means limited to white historians. Plenty Coups,a Crow Indian chief, tells in his 1930 autobiography of a boyhood vision sent himby his animal Helper, the Chickadee. In the dream, a great storm blown by the FourWinds destroyed a vast forest, leaving standing only the single tree in which theChickadee-smallest bu t shrewdest of animals made its lodge. The tribal eldersinterpreted this to mean that white settlers would eventually destroy not only thebuffalo but also all tribes who resisted the American onslaught. n the basis of thisprophetic dream, the Crows decided to ally themselves with the United States, andso they managed to preserve a portion of their homelands. Saving their land didnot spare them from the destruction of the bison herds, however and so they sharedwith other Plains tribes the loss of subsistence an d spiritual communion that hadpreviously been integral to the hunt. As Plenty Coups remarks at the end of hisstory, when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, andthey could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. 3

Few remarks more powerfully capture the importance of narrative to history thanthis last of Plenty Coups: After this nothing happened. For the Crows as for otherPlains tribes, the universe revolved around th e bison herds, and life made sense onlyso long as the hunt continued. When the scene shifted when the bison herds went w y ~that universe collapsed and history ended. Although the Crows continued to live on their reservation and although their identity as a people has neverceased, for Plenty Coups their subsequent life is all part of a different story.36 Thestory he loved best ended with the buffalo. Everything that has happened since ispart of some other plot, and there is neither sense nor joy in telling it.

White, Roots o f Dependency 234 Ibid. Frank Linderman, Plenty coups: h i f o f the r ws (1930; reprint, Lincoln, 1962), 311.36 The danger in the way Plenty Coups ends his story and in Richard White s ending as well, is that the close

of these tragic narratives can all too easily be taken as the end o their protagonists cultural history. The notionthat Indian histories come to an end is among the classic imperialist myths of the frontier, wherein a vanishingrace melts away before the advancing forces of civilization. Plenty Coups s declaration that after this nothinghappened conveys with great power the tragedy of an older Indian generation but says nothing about the generations of Indians who still live within the shadow of that narrative punctuation mark.


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The nothingness at the end of Plenty Coups s story suggests just how completelya narrative can redefine the events of the past and the landscapes of nature to fitthe needs of its plot. After this nothing happened: not frontier progress, not thechallenge of adaptation to an arid land, not the Dust Bowl. Just the nothingnessthat follows the end of a story. is this nothingness that carries me back to the placewhere I began, to my own awareness of a paradox at the heart of my intellectualpractice as an historian. On th e one hand, most environmental historians would bequite comfortable in asserting the importance of the nonhuman world to any understanding of the human past. Most would argue that nature is larger than humanity, that it is not completely an invention of human culture, that it impingeson our lives in ways we cannot completely control, that it is real, and that our taskas historians is to understand the way it affects us and vice versa. Black cloudsbringing dust and darkness from the Kansas sky, overturned sod offering itself asa seedbed for alien grains sprouting amid the torn roots of dying prairie grasses,dry winds filled with the stench of rotting bison flesh as wolves and vultures lingerover their feasts: these are more than just stories.

And yet they are stories too. As such, they are human inventions despite all ourefforts to preserve their naturalness. They belong as much to rhetoric and humandiscourse as to ecology and nature. is for this reason that we cannot escape confronting the challenge of multiple competing narratives in our efforts to understandboth nature and the human past. As I hope my reading of Great Plains history sug-gests, the narrative theorists have much to teach us Quite apart from the environmental historian s analytical premise that nature and culture have become inex-tricably entangled in their process of mutual reshaping, the rhetorical practice ofenvironmental history commits us to narrative ways of talking about nature that areanything bu t natural. If we fail to reflect on the plots and scenes and tropes thatundergird our histories, we run the risk of missing the human artifice that lies atthe heart of even the most natural of narratives.

And just what is a narrative? As the evidence of my Great Plains chronicle wouldimply, it is not merely a sequence of events. To shift from chronicle to narrative,a tale of environmental change must be structured so that, as Aristotle said, it hasbeginning, middle, and end. 37 What distinguishes stories from other forms of discourse is that they describe an action that begins, continues over a well-definedperiod of time, and finally draws to a definite close, with consequences that becomemeaningful because of their placement within the narrative. Completed action givesa story its unity and allows us to evaluate and judge an act by its results. The moralof a story is defined by its ending: as Aristotle remarked, the end is everywherethe chief thing. 8

Narrative is a peculiarly human way of organizing reality, and this has importantimplications for th e way we approach the history of environmental change. Some

37 Aristotle, Poetics in The Complete WOrks of Aristotle The Revised Oxford Translation ed. Jonathan Barnes 2 vols., Princeton, 1984), II, 232l.

. Ibid On the importance of a story s ending in determining its configured unity, see Kermode, Sense of anEnding this can be usefully combined with Edward W. Said, Beginnings Intention n Method (New York, 1975).


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68 The] ouenal of American History March 1992

nonhuman events can be said to have properties that conform to the Aristotelianbeginning-middle-end requirement of storytelling, as when an individual organism(or a species or a mountain range or even the universe itself) is born, persists, anddies. One n tell stories about such things - geologists and evolutionary biologistsoften o but they lack the compelling drama that comes from having a judgeableprotagonist. Things in nature usually just happen, without raising questions ofmoral choice. Many natural events lack even this much linear structure. Some arecyclical: the motions of the planets, the seasons, or the rhythms of biological fertilityand reproduction. Others are random: climate shifts, earthquakes, genetic mutations, and other events the causes of which remain hidden from us. One does notautomatically describe such things with narrative plots, and yet environmental histories, which purport to set the human past in its natural context, all have plots.Nature and the universe do not tell stories; we do. Why is this?

Two possible answers to this question emerge from the work that philosophersand post-structuralist literary critics have done on the relationship between narrativeand history. One group, which includes Hayden White and the late Louis Mink aswell as many of the deconstructionists, argues that narrative is so basic to our culturalbeliefs that we automatically impose it on a reality that bears lit tle or no relationto the plots we use in organizing our experience. Mink summarizes this positionnicely by asserting that the past is not an untold story. The same could presumablybe said about nature: we force our stories on a world that doesn t fit them. 40 Thehistorian s project of recovering past realities and representing them truly or even fairly is thus a delusion. Trapped within our narrative discourse, we could not dojustice either to nature or to the past no mat te r how hard we tried - presuming,of course, that nature or the past even exist at all.

An alternative position, most recently defended by David Carr bu t originally developed by Martin Heidegger, is that although narrative may not be intrinsic toevents in the physical universe, it is fundamental to the way we humans organizeour experience. Whatever may be the perspective of the universe on the things goingon around us, our human perspective is that we inhabit an endlessly storied world.We narrate the triumphs and failures of our pasts. We tell stories to explore the alternative choices that might lead to feared or hoped-for futures. Our very habit of partitioning the flow of t ime into events with their implied beginnings, middles,and ends, suggests how deeply the narrative structure inheres in our experience ofthe world. As Carr puts it, Narrative is no t merely a possibly successful way ofdescribing events; its structure inheres in the events themselves. Far from being a

39 See White, Tropics Discourse; White, Metahistory; Mink, Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument ; alessextreme position that ultimatelyleads toward a similar conclusion can be found in Ricoeur, Time n Narrative

For a useful, if biased, explication of these debates, see Hayden White, The Question of Narrative in Contem

porary Historical Theory, History n

Theory 23 (no. 1 1984), 1-33. A valuable survey can be found in Martin,Recent Theories Narrative40 Mink, Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument; 148. See also Richard T. Vann, Louis Mink s Linguistic

Turn, History n Theory 26 (no. 1 1987), 14.


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is good or bad, and that question can only be answered by referring to our own senseof right and wrong. Nature remains mute about such matters. However passionatelywe may care about the nonhuman world, however much we may believe in its innateworth, our historical narratives, even those about the nonhuman world, remain fo-cused on a human struggle over values. f these values are in effect the meaningswe attach to judgeable human actions nonhuman actions being generally unjudgeable by us - then the center of our stories will remain focused on humanthoughts, human acts, and human values.

is because we care about the consequences of actions that narratives-unlikemost natural processes-have beginnings, middles, and ends. Stories are intrinsically teleological forms, in which an event is explained by the prior events or causesthat lead up to it. This accounts for one feature that all these Great Plains historieshave in common: all are designed so tha t the pl ot and its changing scene - itsenvironment- flow toward the ultimate end of the story. In the most extreme casesif the tale is of progress, then the closing landscape is a garden; if the tale is of crisisand decline, the closing landscape whether located in the past or the future is awasteland. As an obvious but very important consequence of this narrative requirement, opening landscapes must be different from closing ones to make the plotwork A trackless waste must become a grassland civilization. Or: a fragile ecosystemmust become a Dust Bowl The difference between beginning and end gives us ourchance to extract a moral from the rhetorical landscape. Our narratives take changesin the land and situate them in stories whose endings become the lessons we wishto draw from those changes.

However serious the epistemological problems it creates, this commitment toteleology and narrative gives environmental history- all history- its moral center.Because stories concern the consequences of actions that are potentially valued inquite different ways whether by agent, narrator, or audience, we can achieve no neutral objectivity in writing them. Historians may strive to be as fair as they can, but

as these Plains examples demonstrate,it

remains possible to narrate the same evi-dence in radically different ways Within the field of our narratives we too - asnarrators - are moral agents and political actors. As storytellers we commit ourselvesto the task of judging the consequences of human actions, trying to understand thechoices that confronted the people whose lives we narrate so as to capture the fulltumult of their world. In the dilemmas they faced we discover our own, and at theintersection of the two we locate the moral of the story. f our goal is to tell talesthat make the past meaningful, then we cannot escape struggling over the valuesthat define what meaning is

This vision of history as an endless struggle among competing narratives andvalues may not seem very reassuring. How for instance, are we to choose amongthe infinite stories that our different values seem capable of generating? This is the

question that lurks so threateningly at the intersectionsof

the different Great Plainshistories we have encountered. Are nature and the past infinitely malleable in theface of our ability to tell stories about them? The uneasiness that many historiansfeel in confronting th e postmodernist challenge comes down to this basic concern,


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which potentially seems to shake the very foundations of our enterprise. f ourchoice of narratives reflects only our power to impose our preferred version of realityon a past that cannot resist us, then what is left of history?4

Most practicing historians, of course, do not believe that all stories about the pastare equally good, even if we are not very articulate in explaining why one is betteror worse than another. Usually we just declare that we recognize good history whenwe see it. f pressed, we may perhaps offer a few rules of thumb to help define whatwe are looking for Some might argue for depth, saying that the narrative that ex-plains more, that is richer in its suggestions about past causes, meanings, and am-biguities, is the better history. Others might seek breadth, preferring the historicalnarrative that accommodates the largest number of relevant details without con-tradicting any relevant facts. Then again, less may be more: A simple story welltold may reveal far more about a past world than a complicated text that never findsits own center. Inclusiveness is another virtue: a history is better, surely, when it in-corporates many different voices and events to reflect the diversity of past humanexperiences. But maybe coherence is more important: we might demand of good

history that its components be tightly enough linked that i t contains no unnecessaryparts or extraneous details, lest we call it antiquarian. We might ask that a goodhistory reflect the full historiographical tradition that lies behind it while simultane-ously pushing the boundaries ofthat tradition. We of course want it to offer a subtleand original reading of primary sources. should surprise us with new perspectivesand interpretations. We would prefer that it be lucid, engaging, a good read. Andso the list goes on.

All of these are plausible criteria, and most of us would agree that they playapart in helping us recognize good history when we see it. The trouble, obviously,is that they themselves can all too easily become objects of disagreement andstruggle. Indeed, many of them reflect the same sorts of aesthetic judgments thatwe make when encountering any narrative, historical or nonhistorical, fictional or

nonfictional. is not at all clear th at they would help us very much in decidingwhether Webb or Worster or Bonnifield or Plenty Coups is the better narrator ofGreat Plains history. f the criteria we use in deciding the relative merits of historicalnarratives are open to the same sorts of value judgments as the narratives themselves,then we have hardly escaped the dilemma that postmodernist theory has posed forus. We seem still to be rudderless in an endless sea of stories.

Before going any further, I should probably confess my own uncertainty abouthow to navigate from here to a safe harbor, wherever it might be. I first wrote thisessay nearly five years ago in an effort to acknowledge the rich insights that post-modernism has given us into the complexities of narrative discourse. I assembled

43 This question, in a somewhat differentform, is the chieftopic of Peter Novick, That Noble Dream The Ob-jectillity Question n the American Historical Profession Cambridge, Eng., 1988).

As with most of these criteria, there are deep problems here. To say that historical narratives must includeall relevant details and contradict no relevant facts begs the most important question, for the tool we use to definerelevance is narrative itself. Does this particular fact belong to this particular story? Only the story can tell us Totest a narrative by its ability to include facts the relevance of which is defined by the narrative s own plot is toslide rapidly into tautology.


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a small collection of stories about the Great Plains to see what narrative theory mighttell me about the way those stories shape our sense of a landscape and the peoplewho live upon it. The exercise persuaded me that plot and scene and character, beginnings and middles and ends, the rhetoric of storytelling, the different agendasof narrators and readers, all permeate our activities as historians. To deny the richness of this insight would be an evasion of self-knowledge, a willful refusal to recognize the power and the paradoxes that flow from our narrative discourse.

And yet despite what I have learned in writing this essay it has also been a frustrating struggle, because I like most practicing historians, am only willing to followthe postmodernists so far The essay has gone through four radically different ver-sions, each with a different title, each trying to make a different kind of peace withthe dilemmas these Great Plains histories pose. My goal throughout has been toacknowledge the immense power of narrative while still defending the past and nature) as real things to which our storytelling must somehow conform lest it ceasebeing history altogether. Alas, I shared each new version of the essay with a differentgroup of readers and critics, and each time they persuaded m e tha t my efforts tofind safe harbor had failed. Each new version of the essay and each letter and conversation that critiqued it, returned me to where I began: each became a different storyabout the meaning of stories, a different argument about how narrative does anddoes not ground itselfin nature and the past. The essay in other words, recapitulated the very problems it set ou t to solve

But perhaps there lies hidden in this seemingly frustrating fact a partial solutionto the narrative dilemma. Watch: I try one more tack to seek some shelter in thisrhetorical storm.) The same process of r t sm that shaped the different versionsof this essay typifies the production and consumption of all historical texts. The stories we tell about the past do not exist in a vacuum, and our storytelling practiceis bounded in at least three ways that limit ts power. First, our stories cannot contravene known facts about the past. This is so much a truism of traditional historical

method that we rarely bother even to state it , bu t it is crucial if we wish to denythat all narratives do an equally good job of representing the past. At the most basiclevel, we judge a work bad history if it contradicts evidence we know to be accurateand true. Good history does not knowingly lie. A history of the Great Plains thatnarrated a story of continuous progress without once mentioning the Dust Bowlwould instantly be suspect, as would a history of the Nazi treatment of Jews thatfailed to mention the concentration camps. Historical narratives are bounded atevery turn by the evidence they can and cannot muster in their own support .

Environmental historians embrace a second set of narrative constraints: given ourfaith t ha t t he natural world ultimately transcends our narrative power, our storiesmust make ecological sense. You can t pu t dust in the air or tell stories about putting dust in the a i r i f the dust isn t there. 4 Even though environmental historiestransform ecosystems into the scenes ofhuman narratives, the biological and geological processes of the earth set fundamental limits to what constitutes a plausible nar-

. I borrow this lovely epigram from a remark of Patricia Limerick s.


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rative. The dust storms of the 1930s are no t just historical facts bu t natural ones:they reflect the complex response of an entire ecosystem - its soils, its vegetation,its animals, its climate - to hum n actions. Insofar as we can know them, to excludeor obscure these natural facts would be another kind of false silence, another kindof

lying.In choosing to assign narrative meaning to natural events of this sort, we facea special problem, for nature does not tell us whether a dust storm is a good or badthing; only we can do that. Nature is unlike most other historical subjects in lackinga clear voice of its own. The very fact th t Great Plains historians can ascribe to thesame landscape such different meanings is one consequence of this lack of voiceStill, nature is hardly silent. No matter what people do, their actions have real consequences in nature, just as natural events have real consequences for people. In narrating those consequences, we inevitably interpret their meaning according tohum n values- bu t th e consequences themselves are as much nature s choice as ourown. To just that extent, nature coauthors our stories. A Bonnifield and a Worstermay draw radically different lessons from the Dust Bowl bu t neither can deny the

great storms themselves. The powerof

narrative does not extend nearly so farFinally, historical narratives are constrained in a third important way as wellHistorians do not tell stories by themselves. We write as members of communities, nd we cannot help bu t take those communities into account as we do our workBeing American, being male, being white, being an upper-middle-class academic,being an environmentalist, I write in particular ways that are no t all of my ownchoosing, and my biases are reflected in my work. But being a scholar, I write alsofor a community of other schol rs some very different from me in their backgrounds and bi ses who know nearly as much about my subject as I do. They arein a position instant ly to remind me of the excluded facts nd wrong-headed interpretations that my own bias, self-delusion, and lack of diligence have kept mefrom acknowledging.

The stories we write, in other words, are judged not just as narratives, bu t asnonfictions. We construct them knowing th t scholars will evaluate their accuracyand knowing too th t many other people and communit ies those who have apresent stake in the way the past is described wi l l also judge the fairness and truthof what we say Because our readers have th e skill to know what is t in a text aswell as what is in it, we cannot afford to be arbitrary in deciding whether a fact doesor does not belong in our stories. Someone among our re ders bemused colleague, an angry part isan, a wounded victim will eventually inform us of ourfailings. Nature, of course, will not bother to construct such a critique, bu t plentyof others will step forward to speak on its behalf as we ourselves have done. We therefore struggle to anticipate criticisms, to absorb contradictory accounts, and to fitour narratives to what we already know about our subject. Criticism can sometimes

do more harm than good- sapping the life from a story, burying strong argumentsbeneath nitpicking caveats, reinforcing conventional wisdom at the expense of newor radical insights, and murdering passion - bu t it can also keep us honest by forcingus to confront contradictory evidence and counternarratives. We tell stories w t


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each other and against each other in order to speak to each other. Ou r readers, inshort, play crucial roles in shaping the stories we tell. Just so has this essay gonethrough four separate incarnations to reach its present form, each of them re-sponding in different ways to the critical communities tha t in a very real sensehelped author them. No matter how frustrating this process of revision may be, theresulting text is in this case unquestionably better as a result. 46

And what of my own story here? What kind of tale have been telling aboutGreat Plains history? My most visible narrative has of course been a story aboutstorytellers who express their own times and political visions. Each told tales thatembodied the values of a particular community. Each tried to be true to the factsas they then appeared. Each looked back to earlier storytellers, accommodatingthem when possible and trying to demonstrate their inadequacy when this wasnecessary to the success of the newer story The result was a sequence of contestingstories, from tales of frontier progress to the New Deal tragedies, to Malin s and Bonnifield s stories of local resistance in the face of a hostile environment and bureaucracy to Worster s tragedy of environmental crisis and capitalist self-destruction.

But the meaning of my story about stories also reflects that other, more personal,narrative, the one about my struggle to accommodate the lessons of critical theorywithout giving in to relativism. That story began with a question. If postmodernismis correct in arguing that narrative devices are deeply present even in such a fieldas environmental history, which takes for its subject the least human and least storied of worlds- nature- must we then accept that the past is infinitely malleable,thereby apparently undermining the entire historical project? Given my biases, theanswer to this question has got to be no, and so my story has worked its way towardan ending about the ultimate justification of history in community, past reality, andnature itself. For me, there is something profoundly unsatisfying and ultimatelyself-deluding about an endless postmodernist deconstruction of texts that fails toground itselfin history, in community, in politics, and finally in the moral problemof living on earth. Against it, I would assert the virtues of narrative as our best andmost compelling tool for searching out meaning in a conflicted and contradictoryworld.

The danger of postmodernism, despite all the rich insights it offers into the contested terrain of narrative discourse, is that it threatens to lose track of the very thingthat makes narrative so compelling a part of history and human consciousness both.After aU the principal difference between a chronicle and a narrative is that a goodstory makes us re about its subject in a way that a chronicle does not. My listof significant Great Plains events surely had no effect on anyone s emotions ormoral vision, whereas I doubt anyone can read Donald Worster s Dust ow withoutbeing moved in one way or another. More powerfully still, the nothingness at theend of Plenty Coups s story suggests that even silence the ability of narrative to

6 I owe this argument about the role of criticism in limiting historical narratives to Richard White s commentson an earlier version of this essay His help, and the way it has reshaped the text you now read, precisely illustratesmy point about the critical praxis of scholarly communities.

47 Ji m O Brien pointed me toward the importance of this insight.


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Nature History and Narrative 75

rupture the flow of time in the service of its meaning can touch us deeply withits eloquence. When a narrator honestly makes an audience care about whathappens in a story th e story expresses the ties between past and present in a waythat lends deeper meaning to both. This process like everything else in history isopen to criticism since the rhetorical devices for making an audience care can become all too manipulative and sentimental. At its best however historical storytelling helps keep us morally engaged with the world by showing us how to care aboutit and its origins in ways we had not done before.

f this is true then the special task of environmental history is to assert that storiesabout the past are better all other things being equal if they increase our attentionto nature and the place of people within it. They succeed when they make us lookat the grasslands and their peoples in a new way. This is different from saying thatour histories should turn their readers into environmentalists or convince everyoneof a particular political point of view. Good histories rarely do this. But if environmental history is successful in its project the story of how different peoples havelived in and used the natural world will become one of the most basic and fundamental narratives in all of history without which no understanding of the pastcould be complete. Despite the tensions that inevitably exist between nature andour narrative discourse we cannot help but embrace storytelling if we hope to persuade readers of the importance of our subject. As Aristotle reminded us so longago narrative is among our most powerful ways of encountering the world judgingour actions within it an d learning to care about its many meanings.

Because I care so much about nature and storytelling both I would urge uponenvironmental historians the task of telling not just stories about nature but storiesabout stories about nature. I do so because narratives remain our chief moralcompass in the world. Because we use them to motivate an d explain our actionsthe stories we tell change the way we act in the world. They are not just passive ac-counts: in a very literal sense the frontier stories helped c use the Dust Bowl justas the New Deal stories helped cause the government response to that disaster. Wefind in such stories our histories an d prophecies both which means they remainour best path to an engaged moral life. In organizing ecological change into beginnings middles and ends which from the point of view of the universe are fictionspure an d simple w e place human agents at the center of events that they themselves may not fully understand but t ha t they constantly affect with their actions.The end of these human stories creates their unity the telos against which we judgethe efficacy wisdom and morality of human actions.

Historians and prophets share a common commitment to finding th e meaningof endings. However much we understand that an ecosystem transcends mere humanity we cannot escape the valuing process that defines our relationship to it. Tosee how much this is so one has only to consider the various labels Americans haveattached to the Great Plains since 1800: the Land of the Buffalo; the Great American

An extraordinary example of such stories about stories set within the boundaries of a single Kansas countyon the eastern Plains is William Least Heat-Moon Prairy rth deep map Boston 1991 .


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Desert; the Great Plains; the Wheat Belt; the Dust Bowl; the Breadbasket of theWorld; the Land Where the Sky Begins. 49 These are not simply names or descriptivephrases. Each implies a different possible narrative for environmental histories ofthe region, and different possible endings for each of those stories. Narrative is thusinescapably bound to the very names we give the world. Rather than evade -which is in any event impossible-we must learn to use it consciously, responsibly,self-critically. To try to escape the value judgments that accompany storytelling isto miss the point of history itself, for the stories we tell, like the questions we ask,are all finally about value. So it is with questions that I will end:

What do people care most about in the world they inhabit?How do they use and assign meaning to that world?How does the earth respond to their actions and desires?What sort of communities do people, plants, and animals create together?How do people struggle with each other for control of the earth, its creatures,

and its meanings?And on the grandest scale: what is the mutual fate of humanity and the earth?Good questions all, and starting points for many a story

The shifting meanings of the Plains as Great American Desert are explored in Martyn J. Bowden, TheGreat American Desert in the American Mind: The Historiography of a Geographical Notion; in Geographieso th Mind ss ys in Historical Geography ed. David Lowenthal and Martyn Bowden (New York, 1976),119-47. See also William E. Riebsame, The Dust Bowl: Historical Image, Psychological Anchor, and Ecological Thboo, Great Plains Quarterly 6 (Spring 1986), 127-36.

Cronon - 'a Place for Stories'

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